Top 19 -- INXS: Kick

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

When I was in junior high school, I was a good boy. This is not a brag, more of a declaration of fact. I was a member of the National Junior Honor Society, an altar boy and was so consumed by guilt that the mere thought of doing something bad* gave me a stomach ache. Make no mistake, it wasn't that I did good things due to a high moral calling. It's that I was afraid and embarrassed of being caught doing those bad things. 

* Two stories to illustrate my point. One, when I was in seventh grade, I received my first detention because the assistant principal, Mr. Gormaley, caught me running in the halls. I tried explaining that I was late for class, but he didn't care. He wrote me up. By the time I got home, I was so distraught that when I saw my mom, I started bawling uncontrollably over this transgression. "How will Harvard ever accept me now," I wailed. I'm sure my mom rolled her eyes, but she told me that everything was going to be okay and that getting in trouble was part of growing up. My mom was pretty cool, TBH. 

The second story is that pretty much everyone had gone through some sort of kleptomania phase when they were younger. I never did at the "appropriate time". Like I said, I was insanely afraid of getting caught and having to face my family, so I never took anything that wasn't mine. The one day I stole something was in my freshman year At Merrimack College. Every day I'd buy a copy of the Boston Herald and Boston Globe from the school store. There was an issue of the Hockey News next to the papers and on the cover was a picture of the new Toronto Maple Leafs sweater. It was the same jersey as the year before but on the shoulders was a maple leaf patch. For some reason, I had to have it and I didn't feel like paying the $2.50 for the issue. So I placed the News (which was printed tabloid style, so it looked like a newspaper) between the two Boston rags. I paid $1.00 (50 cents for each paper) and walked out the door. After awhile I threw away the Hockey News, but I still feel a twinge of guilt when I think about it. An issue of the Hockey News seems like a pretty lame thing to steal. 

I needed to set the table for this album because in order to fully get why I love it so much, you have to understand where I was at the time I first heard it. Growing up in the 1980s there were three things that I was sure of: AIDS was everywhere, drugs would definitely kill you* and Satanic Panic was real. 

I recall the first time that I heard INXS, it was a night in late March and I wanted to fall asleep, but the hall light was on. Either I had my radio on or my brother did and I heard "Devil Inside" floating over the airwaves. I had no idea who INXS was or where they were from of what they looked like, but I was convinced that they were devil worshipers. I had an idea in my head that even though they didn't sound like a heavy-metal band, what they were singing about definitely made them one. 

* I also thought that Huey Lewis and the News were "definitely into drugs" due to their song, "I Want a New Drug" which obviously glamorized drugs. Huey Lewis and his News might be one of the squarest bands of the 1980s. I'm sure they did drugs, but this song wasn't the 80s version of "White Rabbit". It was just a song about how being in love made you feel. As you can tell, I was a bit of an idiot. But if you read the Guns N' Roses entry, you knew that. 

Even though they had been around for a number of years, INXS blew up during the spring of 1988. "Kick" was massive and was everywhere. The videos for "Devil Inside", "Never Tear Us Apart", "New Sensation", "Mediate" and "Need You Tonight" were constantly run on MTV. The singles were played all over Top 40 radio. It became very apparent very quickly that INXS weren't devil worshippers like W.A.S.P. (it was an acronym for "We Are Satan's People", dontchaknow. And Blackie Lawless sang about fucking like a beast!) obviously was. They were just a fun pop band from Australia who made great hits and interesting looking videos. 

I know that I didn't get this album in the summer of 1988, mostly because I didn't need to. But I probably got this album for Christmas of that year and I wore it out. It was different than the metal that I was listening to at the time (again, see the Guns N' Roses entry for the trio of awesome albums that I first purchased) but "Kick" still rocked. It rocked in a way that Poison or GNR or Kiss or Def Leppard or White Lion didn't. The songs were catchy as hell and even the singles were great. The band did a cover of "The Loved One" that is so awesome, I listen to it a few times a month now, even 32 years later. I won't even bother listening to the original recording because this is the only version that I need. 

Not only did I unequivocally love this album, but it also brought me back to my eighth grade Spanish trip to Montreal (yeah ... I know. Amesbury Middle School was a strange place). Even though I didn't own this tape, I remember listening to it a lot in the hotel room and on the bus trip up to Quebec. This and "Appetite for Destruction" were the two tapes that were played over and over and over again. 

And while Junior High School was the worst three years of my life, when you are an ignored freshman in a big school, it seemed like a fond time. Listening to "Kick" as a ninth grader reminded me of the one truly fun time that I had during those three years. I guess it was my first taste of nostalgia and I liked it. 

This was the only INXS album that I owned, though I was a big fan of their newer albums. I thought that it was cool when my uncle and aunt bumped into band member Andrew Farris when they were in Hawai'i. I was really bummed out when I heard that Michael Hutchence died. My wife and I even watched their reality show when they were trying to find a replacement for Hutchence. They sorta fell through the cracks when people discuss 80s bands, but they shouldn't. They were excellent and an important part of my musical maturation. 

Top 19 -- Guns N' Roses: Appetite for Destruction

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

Looking back with rose colored glasses, one of the things that I liked about living in a pre-Internet world was that as a naive young boy, the world was much more interesting. I believed just about every story that I ever heard. Amesbury High School is a pretty small school in northern Massachusetts, the town sits at about 16,000 and the sports team are meh at best. But I heard two stories of AHS athletes who turned down full-boat athletic scholarships because each wanted to "stay in state due to their girlfriend" and completely believed both of them. Years later I found out that both of those stories weren't true at all. 

I'm not sure why I believe them, but they seemed plausible (at least for one of the guys) and it didn't seem like a malicious rumor (neither one of those guys would have started a rumor about themselves) but I think that I wanted to live in a world where I went to school with two super star athletes who turned down potential fame and fortune for a girl. Not that I would do that. But for someone else, that seemed sorta romantic--though I'd never admit that--and also sorta cool. "Yeah, I could have gone to a Division One school but I decided not too." Lots of self restraint there. At least that's how I looked at it. If this was true, the other perspective is that the athlete was too afraid to test his mettle in the big time. But like I said, this story was not true. 

This belief of off-the-wall stories wasn't just limited to Amesbury High School athletes. If you told me a story about a celebrity, chances are I'd almost 100% believe it. Not only that, but I'd tell the next person I saw. When Guns N' Roses first popped into my universe, they seemed to come out of nowhere. Who were these guys? Why were they dressed like that? Why did they act like that? Why did they look like? They appeared really fucking dangerous. I was in eighth grade when I first experienced GNR and I know that they'd kick my ass for my lunch money. And they were adults. 

They sneered, they appeared completely out of it (I don't think that I understood what being drunk was, never mind being high), they fought every body and they were all skinny and gross. But the most mysterious Gunner was Slash. Slash wasn't his real name, right? What does he even look like, you never get to see him with his mop of hair in his face or that goofy top hat. Like, seriously, who the fuck wore a top hat in 1988? Irony wasn't a heavily traded commodity back then, so the answer to that question is no one. I was top the reason why you never saw Slash's face and the reason why he wore a top hat is because he had AIDS in his face. 

AIDS. In. His. Face. 

Yup. I was such a dum dum, I thought that AIDS can be transmitted to specific body parts and poor Slash had it in his face which is why his hair was always hiding his eyes and nose and ears. Like I said, I pretty much believed anything and I sure as hell bought this. I probably told everyone I knew and I everyone thought that I was a big dipshit, but it's cool. Live and never learn. That's what I say!

Face AIDS aside, I remember buying "Appetite for Destruction", Poison's "Open Up and Say Ahhhh" and Kiss' "Crazy Nights" with my eight grade graduation money. They were the first tapes that I bought that were a bit out of my comfort zone. One tape was pretty terrible, the other one was okay but "Appetite" was incredible. I had never heard anything like that up until then. 

The songs were grimy and slick, enticing and off-putting, electric and aggressive and tough and drugged out and boozy and vulnerable and honest. Axl Rose was like a chameleon in his voice--I was sure that old AIDS face himself, Slash, was singing on "It's So Easy" because Rose didn't look like he could sing like that. I'm not sure what that meant, but I believed it. 

AFD was what I thought an adult album sounded like. There were lots of songs about drugs--though I didn't understand what they were singing about, sex--ditto and swearing. I knew the last part. To be completely honest, I'm not sure if I was ready for this yet, but I dove right into that pool. I can recall one day my brother and I were on the floor of my room playing with Legos and listening to this tape and on "It's So Easy" Axl (or was it Slash, I'll never know) sang loudly, "Why don't you just ... FUCK OFF!" before a guitar solo squealed in. At that very moment my entered my room and asked us a question. I don't recall what she asked about, but I do remember Jay and I looking at each other, eyes wide and mouths agape. 

"Do you think she heard that, By?"

"I think so. She was right here when he screamed it."

"Do you think that we're going to get in trouble?"

"I'm not sure."

I remember wondering whether I'd ever hear this tape again. And I remember trying to come up with an excuse as to why Axl (or Slash) said that and whether I knew about it prior to the purchase of the tape for plausible deniability purposes. But my mother never mentioned it. Ever. I doubt that she even heard it, or if she did, she was cool with it.

But that's the type of kid that I was. At the time, I was still sitting on the floor playing Legos with my nine-year-old brother listening to a tape of depraved junkies sing about the worst parts of humanity that they run into on the streets of Los Angeles. Unlike "Straight Outta Compton" I definitely didn't think that I was a bad ass. I was too young for that. I cared that people thought that I was a good boy, especially adults. I mean, I was still an altar boy during this time in my life* and would be for another year. 

* I've discussed this before, but my first job was working for the church where I served as an altar boy. I got paid $10 a week to open the church before Mass and get it ready for the day's celebration. If I didn't serve, I'd either go hang out at the rectory or sit in the sacristy and listen to my Walkman and wait until Mass ended. One day I was listening to my Walkman and the church pastor** came up to me and asked what I was listening to. I answered, "Kiss". He said, "Oh you mean Knights in Satan's Service?" and I'm sure that I stammered something out, but that made me feel like I was doing something wrong. I mean, he wasn't incorrect, I was doing something wrong (Kiss' "Crazy Night" fucking blows) but Paul, Gene, Bruce and Eric weren't devil worshipers. They were just four dudes who liked wasting money and trying to hold on to some semblance of relevance. 

** About 15 years after this interaction, the priest who asked me about this was found in the middle of the Massachusetts Archdiocese sex scandal. Though he wasn't into kids, he had a fondness for prisoners. He'd go to jail on the first Tuesday (in the article he called it "fresh meat day", which gross) and find his prey. 

No matter how you slice it, "Appetite for Destruction" is on a short list of the best debut albums ever. Guns N' Roses never again reached this level of greatness. They got bloated and couldn't deal with being famous, but for a little while, they were the absolute pinnacle of the rock world. They were mysterious and ubiquitous at the same time. "Sweet Child O' Mine" ran every hour on MTV, yet I knew nothing about them. 

It was a fantastic time to be a fan. 

Top 19 -- Veruca Salt: American Thighs

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

On the list of these 15 or so albums (it actually might be more, I'm having a lot of fun writing these blog posts), this might be the album that I've listened to the least. I like it a lot, but this album and this band is really an amalgam of all the female bands that came out in the mid-90s that I enjoyed. From the Breeders to Juliana Hatfield to Belly to L7 to Garbage to Liz Phair to Jewel (yeah, I know) to Letters to Cleo to the Cranberries to Luscious Jackson to Hole*, there was something about a woman with a guitar that just got me. 

Yes, all of these women were good looking and I'm sure that had something to do with it initially. And I know that sounds chauvinistic but beauty sort of wears off once you buy their CD and spend a lot of time listening to it. I'm not sure why the record industry started pushing female-lead bands, but I'm glad they did. It was a great alternative to the male-dominated rock songs that were ruling the charts at the time. 

What made the female-lead rock band explosion so interesting is that for years, the music industry seemed to ignore females and guitars. Through the 80s (when I was growing up in music), rock and roll was male dominated. If you were a woman, you played pop. Maybe some R&B. The only women who rocked were Joan Jett, Lita Ford (who both were in the 70s sexploitation band "The Runaways") and Pat Benatar. They were considered anomalies and curiosities, not real "rockers" like Warrant or Winger. But they were. Those women fucking rocked harder than a lot of guys, because they had to. But they never seemed to be taken too seriously. 

* Did I like Courtney Love? No. Like a lot of "serious" music fans, I spent a lot of the 90s blaming her for the death and subsequent profiteering of Kurt Cobain. Even before Cobain took his life, Love was cast as the Yoko Ono of the 1990s. Was this fair? I don't know. Possibly. Possibly not. Cobain was a troubled guy and I think that people who put their faith in him as the voice of a generation couldn't face that it was him that was letting them down, so they turned their vitriol towards Love. That being said, Love was also a loud, obnoxious, opportunistic, drug addled mess (though it's funny, we tend to worship men who are loud, obnoxious, opportunity, drug addled messes -- but that's a discussion for another day). But her band rocked. Whether Cobain or Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan wrote their songs, it doesn't matter; Hole fucking delivered. And I think that what was so maddening about Courtney Love. If she was a no-talent, it would be easier to dismiss her. But she was talented and she controlled the narrative and sometimes that's tough to wrap your brain around. 

Veruca Salt was fronted by guitarist Nina Gordon and Louise Post with drummer Jim Shaprio and bassist Steve Lack marking up the rhythm section. You didn't really see Shapiro and Lack very much, the focus was on Gordon and Post. Their first single, "Seether" was a pretty big hit on MTV and that's when I first discovered the band. I recall hearing the single in 1994 and that's all I thought about. 

I bought the album some time later and it's excellent, my favorite song of the 90s is on it: "Number One Blind". The video only aired on MTV a handful of times, which is borderline criminal. It really captures a time in my life when things were in a strange upheaval of where I knew that I was in one place, but I wasn't going to be there for too long. My educational journey was ending soon and the real world was coming on fast. I was an English major, but what the fuck does that get me in the job world? 

The chorus, "Levolor, which of us is blind?" is haunting and has continued to stay with me for a long time. Not just because of the words, but the way that Gordon so ablely sings it. The dueling guitars through out the song also bring a sort of sadness that adds to the melancholy and diachotomy of the lyrics. "Be my blind. Be it all the time. Be it night or day. Take my sun away. Away." There's a push and pull in this song that just grabs me. I can't explain why or how, but every so often you land on a song that just nails you right. 

"Number One Blind" from Veruca Salt does that. 

A few years ago the band reunited (there was a rumor that Gordon and Post dissolved the band because one found out that the other was sleeping with Foo Fighter Dave Grohl) and I wanted to see them. This was during our time in Burlington when we had close to zero friends, so I couldn't ask anyone around here. None of my college friends wanted to go and for some reason, I didn't feel like going by myself, so I asked the priest who married Aly and I if he wanted to go. Our priest is an incredibly nice man, whose close to my age and has incredibly awesome musical taste. He deferred too. What sucked about not seeing them is that they played "Number One Blind".

The following year the came back into town in support of their newest album "Ghost Notes" (which is actually pretty awesome, you should check it out) and we suddenly had a group of friends in town. I asked my friend Ken if he wanted to go (he had never really heard of them before) and he agreed. And it was a great show. They didn't play "Number One Blind", but that was okay. The club that we saw them, the Paradise, is pretty small so we got really close to the band. And again, they ripped it up. 

Top 19 -- Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so does this list.

A lot of times when I look back and write about stuff from the past, I'm not 100 percent sure that it's accurate. I'm not saying that I'm lying, but if you had a time machine and went back to verify the events as portrayed, I'm not sure if it would be completely true. (BTW, great use for a time machine. Geesh, get off my back and go kill
baby Hitler first.) Memories tend to fog with the passage of time, things sort of meld together and so on. 

With that preamble (two preambles! How lucky!) I think that one of the more important times in a young person's life is the first time he or she comes back home from college and visits their old high school friends. For me it was a little more than two months since I last saw them, when I came home during the 1992 Columbus Day long weekend, but it seemed liked a lot of things had changed. My friends seemed to dress a little differently, their hair was shaggier and they were filled with stories of the "craziest people" who did the "craziest shit" and "I should have been there". 

But I wasn't there. For the first time, I didn't experience the same things that they did. And here's the important part: I didn't give a shit. At all. I didn't care that they knew a guy who once drank 21 beers. I didn't care about that insane party at that frat house. I didn't care about the teacher who gave a mountain of reading on the first day of classes. And I really didn't care about the bands that they brought back to Amesbury. 

And to be completely honest, I'm sure they didn't care at all about my tales from Merrimack College. 

I recall that weekend, my friend Jesse brought home a tape of a local University of New Hampshire band called Groove Child and he played it constantly. They were a jam band, which, yeah. Groove Child obviously spent a lot of time listening to the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers and did their very best trying to emulate them. They were ... fine. I guess. I mean it was cool that UNH had their own band that everyone loved, but whatever. I couldn't give less of a shit about them. 

Merrimack didn't have that kind of music scene. There was a few campus bands, but they mostly played out-of-tune Pearl Jam covers. No one ever bought one of their tapes, as far as I know. So instead of some local band, I came home with Smashing Pumpkins "Siamese Dream". I was not the first person to land on the Smashing Pumpkins planet. They had release "Gish" a year or two prior and were on MTV here and there. But, I don't think my home friends had really listened to them. 

We listened to them a lot at Merrimack. Especially when we were drinking in the dorms. These parties, I guess you could call them that, was where some of my best college friendships were forged and this album was the soundtrack to that. I wanted to recreate the same scene at home with my high school buddies. The important thing to know about this story was "Siamese Dream" hadn't blown up yet* and I don't think that my friends really cared for the tape very much. 

* Smashing Pumpkins might be one of the last groups where I listened to the album a ton, but knew nothing about the band. I knew that Billy Corgan was the lead singer and guitarist, D'Arcy was the incredibly pretty bassist, James Iha was the guitarist and Jimmy Chamberlin was the drummer. That's pretty much all I knew. I assumed that they were from the Pacific Northwest (they were from Chicago, but at the time all bands were seemingly from Seattle) because of their sound and I had no idea that Corgan was a megalomaniac Svengali. I just thought that they were a normal band who made really cool music.  

We must have gone to a party that weekend and I suggest that we pop in "Siamese Dream" and we probably listened to "Cherub Rock" (the first song on the album) once and then Jesse popped Groove Child into the tape player and we'd have to hear that for the next hour. Jesse wasn't the leader of our crew, but one of our friends who held more sway in the group visited him at UNH a lot and he had a good looking sister whose friends were also drinking beers with us and all of them were into Groove Child, so I was subsequently outvoted. 

Which again, was, whatever. It was the first time that I wasn't in sync with my high school friends. I wasn't pissed at them (that would happen a few years down the road) but at the same time I remember thinking, "Hanging out with these guys isn't as fun as I remembered. I wish that I was back at college."

And that's what was important about this album. It showed me that I had changed and my friends had changed and we had different views from each other. That was scary. And I sorta felt that something was wrong with me--we were all supposed to be best friends forever (which sounds dumb now, but it didn't in 1992)--but people change. Circumstances change. It's okay not to unequivocally love the past. And yes, Thomas Wolfe, you're right, you can't go home again. 

Top 19 -- Living Colour: Vivid

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

Here's what I wrote on Facebook today, "Here's another quick story: I loved this album when it came out. L-O-V-E-D this album. I know that I've said this about every single album that I've written about in the last ten day, but I must've listened to this album, bare mins, 130,000 times. I was obsessed with this album and this band. One day at my house, my friend turned on "Cult of Personality" and I started headbanging (and with the size of my noggin, you shouldn't do that) and I literally put a portion of my bed through the floor. After being blown away by the video on MTV, I remember going to the Liberty Tree Mall, marching into a Record Town and demanding "Vivid". When the clerk said he had no idea what Vivid was or who Living Colour was, I got really indignant and said, "Some day you will!" That was the type of fire that this band inspired in a meek, socially awkward 14-year-old. This band. This was MY band. I knew no one else who liked them as much as I did."

Pretty much from the first time I saw the video for "Cult of Personality", I knew that Living Colour was fucking awesome. There was something so different about this song, it rocked like crazy, but at the same time they weren't singing about looking for nothing but a good time or girls, girls, girls. This band was singing about something important? Smart? Philosophical? All that, really. And that's what hit me. I had no idea what a cult of personality was. It seemed interesting though, there are images of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Josef Stalin and Gandhi. 

The more I found out about it, the more I was like, yes, this is smart. And listening to this song makes me feel smarter. This album must be amazing. And once I finally got it, I was right, it was fucking amazing. I loved each song. From the heart of "Open Letter to a Landlord" to the poignant "Funny Vibe" (which was my first introduction to Chuck D and Flavor Flav or Public Enemy) to the Talking Heads cover of "Broken Hearts", this was something that I wasn't used to hearing. 

I saw this band twice--once they play "Vivid" from start to finish--and they were some of the best shows that I have ever seen. I remember the first time and I couldn't believe that I was at the Paradise in Boston, so close to the band. It was like a dream come true. Really. 

The one thing that I remember about Living Colour is that on the day that the Red Sox won Game 4 in the 2004 ALCS, I was supposed to go the Pats/Seahawks game in the afternoon and then haul ass to the House of Blues across the street from Fenway to watch a Living Colour/Public Enemy show. My plan was to watch the rest of the baseball game at one of the Landsdowne Street bars before heading back to Aly's place in Brookline. 

The night before the Sox got bombed by the Yanks, 19-8 putting them in a 3-0 hole. I was so depressed I disavowed my Sox fandom,I cancelled on the Patriots game, never went to the PE/LC show (a double bill that would have broken my brain in 1990) and didn't watch the Red Sox (out of protest) until the eighth inning. After the Sox won that game, I was back on the trolley and watched them roll through New York and then St. Louis as they won their first World Series since 1918. 

I'm bummed that I didn't go to the Pats-Seahawks game but I really sad that I never saw the Public Enemy/Living Colour show. That sucked. 

There were some great things about growing up when I did, but one of the shitty things was an absence of information. With the internet, we take this for granted that if we want to read something about a thing that we like all we have to do is pull out our phones and go to Google. Boom. Instant information. And a lot of it is true!

In the 80s, you had to really search for stuff. With the other things that I was into (comics and baseball--sports in general), it was easy. There was sports new every day on TV or in the paper, plus I had subscriptions to Sports Illustrated and Sporting News. Comics were a little tougher, but there were tons of magazines devoted to comics. And since I liked Marvel Comics, it was easy to keep up with the latest news. 

But if you lived in Amesbury, MA; you weren't going to get a lot of information on your favorite band. Maybe there'd be a story in the Globe or the Herald if the band was going on tour or had just released a new album. Maybe you could find a blurb in a Rolling Stone. But that was about it. The metal magazines didn't cover Living Colour and neither did the pop mags. There were no zines anywhere I lived. 

When you look through the rose-colored glass of nostalgia, you might be tempted to say that this was "magical". You had to work for your information and it made it so much better. But that's bullshit. I like being able to check stuff out when I want, wherever I want. 

I doubt that I'd love Living Colour any more than I did when I didn't know much about them. And maybe it was cooler that there was a little mystery about Corey, Vernon, Muzz and Will; but I don't know. 

One last thing about this album, and it's very embarrassing to me, is the art work. It was obvious that this was some sort of free-flowing abstract-y kind of painting. But it didn't hit me until many, many, MANY years later that the green shape in the middle of the album cover is NOT Africa. It's a man's head.  And the black shape in the top left hand corner are not fingers. They're just weird shapes. 

My thought when looking at this picture with the red lines emanating from the green shape, was that Living Color was making a statement that all of culture comes from Africa. And that the black fingers were showing how that culture touches us all. 

I know. I know. 

Top 19 -- N.W.A.: Straight Outta Compton

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

Here's what I wrote on Facebook today, "Here's another quick story: when I first heard this album, I was about 15-years-old. When you're 15-years-old, there is a weird dichotomy in your brain. You want to be part of a group, but at the same time, you want to be unique. You want to tell the entire world to go fuck itself but at the same time you're deathly afraid of doing so. You done with being a kid but you can't begin to handle adult responsibilities. Therefore you begin to find ways of trying to express yourself, your frustrations, your confusion, find someone or something that has similar problems; otherwise you might explode. For me, it was this cassette tape put out by five guys who were figuratively and literally the opposite of me and my entire surroundings. They expressed the frustrations and confusion that I was experiencing every day. Maybe what they were rapping about wasn't exactly relatable--I didn't have a problem with the police or women weren't rying to convince me that they were carrying my baby--but the emotions that they conveyed did."

I've written about NWA a lot. Probably more than any other band that I've listened to, which is weird because they only really had one album that I liked. The other two, "100 Miles and Runnin' " and "Efil4Zaggin" had their moments, but once Ice Cube left, the band sort of fell apart into a self-parody of what they once were. 

So I think what prompts me to continuously write about a band--actually an album--that I really loved when I was 15-years-old is how it made me feel at that age. Like I wrote up top, there's a lot of pushing and pulling in a teenager's head. You need to make sure that you get that frustration out before it boils over. Just be listening to "Straight Outta Compton" allowed me to relieve some of that pressure. It was loud, it was aggressive, it was in-your-face, it didn't give a fuck. All of those things are the opposite of me. When I rapped along with NWA, I wasn't Byron Magrane anymore. I was someone completely different. 

And I think that's why this album was such a hit with a lot of kids that I knew. Sure, the words and what they say are shocking the first 100 times you listen to them. After awhile though, if you're still listening, the message is even more reticent. Like everyone wants to be in a gang--I'm not talking about the crips or the bloods--I'm talking about being in a group of people with like minded thoughts. Not only that but you want your gang on the outside. There's no fun in being the favorite, the underdog, the downtrodden, the group that's going to rise up and show those bourgeois pigs who's boss was where you wanted to be. You want to be the group of people who sees through the bullshit and speaks truth to power. 

That was NWA. This group was popular, but they couldn't get on MTV or the radio. They sold millions of albums, yet you never saw them on any late night shows. They were the World's Most Dangerous Band and when you're 15 or 16-years-old, that's how you feel. No one really recognizes you. You're doing stuff, some of it great, but no one cares. In fact the only responses you get are negative. "Clean your room!" "Do your homework!" "Dump that beer in the fire!" "Run 15 laps!" 

You're powerless and it sucks. You know who else was powerless? Ice Cube, MC Ren, Dr. Dre, Eazy E and Yella Boy. You know who fought back? That's right, NWA. If they can do it, why couldn't we? At least that was the theory. 

One day we were all talking. The annual lip-sync was approaching and they were looking for acts. Wouldn't it be awesome if a bunch of us did "Fuck the Police"? Could you imagine the principal and the vice principal and everyone else totally freaking out? They'd talk about us for years! We'd be the (very white) NWA of Amesbury, MA. The more we talked about it, the more a plan formed. "I have a White Sox, Raiders and LA Kings hat!" "I have these awesome Locs!" "I know the dude who does the PA for the lip sync, we can tell them that we're going to do 'Express Yourself' and at the last minute substitute 'Fuck the Police'!" 

We must have talked about this plan for hours, getting us more and more excited. The lip-sync day came and went, and myself and my friends sat in the audience. We never put the plan into action. In fact, I don't think we ever talked about it again. 

We weren't NWA. We weren't anywhere even close. We were just four scared white boys who talked shit and never backed it up. NWA may as well have been Spider-Man or Bat Man; we'd never be like them. That's okay. Not everyone can be iconoclasts. That's what makes them special. The rest of us just have to bask in their glory and dream. 

Top 19 -- David Cross: Shut Up You Fucking Baby

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

Here's what I wrote on Facebook today, "Here's another quick story: first off, this is a comedy CD. Secondly, when I bought it in the spring of 2003, I was familiar with David Cross (mostly from the seminal sketch show, "Mr. Show with Bob and David") but I didn't know his stand up act. I think that I listened to this CD front to back, probably 10,000 times. It crystalized everything that I was thinking (politically) at the time. And not only was Cross able to pinpoint exactly what was wrong with the country at the time, but he was able to do so in an uproariously funny way. If you haven't heard it yet, do so; "Shut Up You Fucking Baby" is the best."

2002 was a weird time. We were still really scared about terrorism, the year prior the towers came down and we started fighting in Afghanistan. The Bush administration was taking away our freedoms in exchange for our safety and his conservative cronies were clamping down on America and trying to turn the country into their vision. 

For the most part, no one really said anything. The reason was that there was so much patriotism, you worried about being labeled a traitor if you brought up that maybe the White House shouldn't be torturing prisoners or maybe we shouldn't be killing innocent people or maybe letting the President and the Vice President do what they want whenever they want however they want might be kind of shitty and maybe all of this flag waving, rah-rah, 'MERICA FUCKING RULES jingoism isn't really the best road to go down. 

Aside from a few comics, like Jon Stewart, this was some thoughts that were just bubbling under the surface. I heard them, and they started to germinate in my brain. But I wasn't completely on board until I heard "Shut Up You Fucking Baby". 

Let me step back, for the most part, I've identified myself as an Independent. However after listening to Cross, the idea that any Republican had my best interests in mind went out the window. This double album was scintillating. The way that Cross railed against the people in power--specifically the Republicans--and how they were using 9/11 as a cover to loot this company and reshape it into something that resembled the 1950s was absolutely astounding. 

Cross is able to deliver his message without sounding preachy. There is a thin line between comedy and whining. Cross never jumps over that line. He comes close some time, but he always slams it home with a joke. I have all of his concert albums and I've seen him live at least three times--like I said he's my favorite comedian--but nothing that he has done compares to this two-disc set. He's still awesome, but he's not as transcendent as he was here. That's a high bar to reach, BTW, I don't expect him to do so. 

After listening to this album, it became obvious to me that David Cross wasn't just the guy in the t-shirt and cargo shorts who stood next to the suit-ed Bob Odenkirk on Mr. Show. David Cross was a firebrand who spoke truth to power. This album literally shaped the way that I viewed public figures for the rest of my life. I haven't listened to this album in a long time, but I should revisit it. I didn't think that things could get much worse than the G.W. Bush administration, but it obviously has. 

I think that I need to listen to this again. 

Top 19 -- Beastie Boys: Paul's Boutique

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

Here's what I wrote on Facebook today, "Here's another quick story: right this very second, the Beastie Boys are my favorite band. Not that you asked, but if you did, that's what I'd say. And this is my favorite album by my favorite band. I've liked the Beastie Boys a lot since when I first heard "License to Ill". Like most kids my age, I wore that tape out and memorized all of the songs. When Paul's Boutique came out, I remember seeing the video for "Hey Ladies" on MTV and not quiet understanding what I was watching. This doesn't sound or look anything like "Fight for Your Right (to Party)" or "No Sleep till Brooklyn". Why were the BBoys wearing 70s clothes? Why weren't they rapping about partying? I didn't like it. At all. It took me a few years to understand and appreciate "Paul's Boutique" but once it sunk its hooks into me, it never let go. I've probably heard this album 10,000 in a variety of places: blasting through the speakers of my friend's 1973 Impala as we cruised through Amesbyry, on a CD through a pair of headphones before I fell asleep in college, over an Alexa speaker while washing the dishes and just about every time I hear something brand new. The sound pastiche that the Beasties created can never be replicated again (the sample budget alone would be astronomical), this album is really one of a kind. If you haven't heard this in awhile, revisit it now."

My wife, oldest daughter and I watched the Beastie Boys documentary on Apple+ on Saturday, which I think is what got me thinking about this album. I'd say that I listen to this album at least once a month, it's one of the few that I go from beginning to end, but I haven't really thought about it in a long time. But "Paul's Boutique" shaped me in a way that was not only musically, but in the way that I look at how other people like things. 

Everyone likes the Beastie Boys, but at one point, no one liked "Paul's Boutique", it was too esoteric, too out-there, not enough like "Licensed to Ill" and like I said, I felt that same way. For awhile at least. Then a friend of mine told me to listen to it again, really listen to the lyrics and the music and he was so effusive about how awesome the tape was, I went home and listened to the copy of PB that he dubbed for me. 

And he was right, it was fucking mind-blowing. The jokes per minute on this album was off the charts, the layers upon layers upon layers of sound was like a painter using different colors, one on top of another over and over again, until something beautiful formed. It didn't happen over night, there were a few songs that I latched on to right away, "Egg Man", "Johnny Ryall" and "Shake Your Rump" were the first three songs on the tape and the first three that I really enjoyed. It didn't hurt that "Egg Man" was a song that my buddy chose for the annual high school lip sync and he did an awesome job choreographing a story to that tune.

But like I said, once I got it, I became a snob about whether you understood the Beasties the "way I did", which looking back wasn't very much at all*. I thought that if you liked LtI but didn't like PB, there was something fundamentally wrong with you. I never understood that I was in the same boat myself until someone was cool enough to tell me what my problem was. 

* The Beastie Boys worked with producers the Dust Brothers on making this album. They and another guy, Matt Dike, were the ones who supplied a lot of the beats that made "Paul's Boutique" "PAUL'S MOTHERFUCKING BOUTIQUE". For some reason, when I heard that the Dust Brothers worked on the album, I thought that the Beasties were all on Angel Dust when they made this album, which is why it sounds so fucking weird. So the lesson, is that I really shouldn't be questioning anyone's intelligence when it comes to liking or disliking things. 

Anyway, this album has been with me for a long time. And I've moved beyond just liking the first three songs. To me, this is one of the best and most influential hip-hop albums ever made. So many people have called it the "Sgt. Peppers" of rap and I think that they're right. But it's much more than that. When Sgt. Peppers landed, even though it wasn't like anything that the Beatles did, it was still a big hit. For "Paul's Boutique" it took a long time for it to become a classic. But it is. The Beasites were right, they usually always were, just took a long time for us to catch up. 

Just writing about it makes me want to play it, really loud.  

Top 19 -- The Beatles: Revolver

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

Here's what I wrote on Facebook today, "Here's another quick story:this was the first real Beatles album I ever bought and it was in the months after I graduated from college. I'm not sure why it took so long. In college I had the Blue and Red best of albums and I guess that was working out okay. I'm really happy that this was the first proper Beatles CD I ever bought, from front-to-back, I consider it their best one. The music and the lyrics were so awesome and psychedelic that it was conscious expanding. The autumn that I bought this album, I was still delivering pizzas, so anytime I hear a song from Revolver, I can still smell pizza or steak and cheese subs. It's a delicious memory."

What's there to say about the Beatles that hasn't already been said? They're the most influential band of the last 60 years and you can make an argument that they're the most influential band since a bunch of neanderthals first got together and started rhythmically banging rocks and sticks together at the same time. 

Some of my earliest memories are from The Beatles. I can dimly recall being a toddler and going into my parents' bedroom before the crack dawn begging to watch television. Back in those days, TV wasn't a 24/7 thing. For most channels, the broadcast day would begin at 5:55 AM and end at 1:00 AM. Those five-ish hours where there was no programming would be filled with a test pattern and music from a local radio station. When I'd awake prior to start time, my Mom would plop me down in front of the TV, find my favorite station (WLVI Channel 56 forever!) and tell me to listen to the music and watch "The Wheel", which is what I'd call the test pattern, mostly because it looked like a wheel. 

The one song that I remember most from my wheel watching was the Beatles "Good Day Sunshine", which is one of the songs featured on this album. 

As I grew older, the Beatles' music was always around. I think that it was REM front man Michael Stipe who described it as "elevator music".  The reason isn't because it's as banal and soulless as the music that was once played in elevator, but because it's everywhere all the time. 

In junior high school, my music teacher spent a half year explaining to us, in great detail, about the "Paul is Dead" rumor. A lot of that explanation used lyrics and music from Revolver. One of his biggest pieces of "evidence" were the opening lyrics, "She Said, She Said". Unfortunately, since there was no internet around in 1987, I don't think that my teacher knew that the lines, "I know what it's like to be dead" were spoken by Peter Fonda to John Lennon while the former was tripping on LSD at a Hollywood party. 

The Blue Album, which I referred to above, was an album that I listened to a lot in college. There were more than a few cuts from "Revolver" on that as well. 

In any event, when I finally put on the album and listened to it, I had a flood of memories rushing back to me. Even though it was brand new, it felt like something that I had been very aware of almost since birth. 

Top 19 -- Pearl Jam: Ten

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

Here's what I wrote on Facebook today: "Here's another quick story: for a long time Pearl Jam was my band. For a long time, Pearl Jam was everyone's band. When I rolled up to Merrimack College in the fall of 1992, it seemed that everyone had one CD: Pearl Jam Ten. It didn't matter where you were from, what you looked like, you had Ten. And you played it, a lot. When you got drunk, you tried to sing like Eddie Vedder. When you went to a bar and there was a cover band, they played Pearl Jam songs. Then Kurt Cobain died and Eddie Vedder decided to live and people sort of forgot about Pearl Jam. But like the Simpsons, Pearl Jam continues to pump out new material and while they're nowhere near the zeitgeist anymore, they're still alive."

Yes. I ended that post of a Dad Joke. I don't care, the opportunity was there and you're god damn right, I took it. 

I think that Pearl Jam gets a bad rap sometimes. And it all comes back to the fact that Kurt Cobain died at 27 and Eddie Vedder didn't. I'm not the world's biggest Bill Simmons fan, but a number of years ago he wrote something to the effect of before Cobain died, Pearl Jam was indisputably the biggest rock band in the world. Nirvana released "In Uetero" and Pearl Jam lapped them with "Vs" until April 5, 1994. When Cobain died by suicide, he--and his band--was frozen in amber and instantly propelled into the "voice of a generation". 

Pearl Jam? They released some great stuff, got into a fight with TicketMaster, famously didn't make any videos and just kept trucking along. The general public forgot about them, which is something that I think that they wanted, and then the backlash began, which is something I don't think that they wanted but at the same time I don't think that they really cared about. The backlash basically centered around Pearl Jam not being Nirvana. Which I think is a little unfair. 

Pearl Jam and Nirvana will always be intertwined. There are reasons for that and some of them are valid, but there were also a lot of differences between the two groups. Even though they hailed from the same city, were cornerstones for a "new" kind of music and had a lot of the same friends and influences, PJ and Nirvana wasn't Yankees-Red Sox, Dodger-Giants, Cardinals-Cubs, no matter how much the press tried to present them as such. Yes, Cobain called them frauds or something similar, but he recanted. 

Pearl Jam and Nirvana got famous at about the same time but once they reached their pinnacles, they chose different paths to being remembered. 

I've been a Pearl Jam fan for a long time, I'm not as much as a fanatic anymore, but I still really like them. The reason? Hearing Ten brings me back to college. It reminds me of the times when as a scared freshmen, I'd wander from room to room on the hall looking for people who were similar to me. Even though it was ubiquitous, hearing "Ten" was a sign post. I mean, if they liked Eddie and the boys, how bad could they be?

Yes, Pearl Jam was grunge, but I think that they thought that they were more than that. I think that they wanted to follow in the footsteps of The Who rather than The Ramones. And they did. They still sell out shows every time they play. They still put on great concerts (I've been to six). They give a shit about their fans. The one thing that they carried from the 1990s that I wish more bands would do is their sincerity. They stand for something and I think that Pearl Jam believes the things that they say which is refreshing. 

Call it corny if you want (and plenty of people will) but I wish that more bands did that.